A Repository for C. A. Howard's Brain Traffic

Da Luigi, the restaurant in this photo, is not far from the Blue Grotto on Capri. If I had only one afternoon to live, I think I would like to spend it here. Drift on in to the little cove in the boat you've hired for the day, drop anchor, and await the restaurant's launch that will bring you in to the sunbathing area. This is where I like to look around to see if my future wife is in attendance. From there, a chatty Italian waiter will escort you to your table, where you are encouraged to while away the afternoon over delicious food, wine, and plates of olives, prosciutto, and parmigiano.

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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

This Book Has Had a Huge Influence On Me . . .

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, by Mona Charen

My friend Terry urged me to read this book in the fall of 2004, and it deeply affected me. It is totally free of any sort of emotional distortions or embellishments. It just hammers home fact after fact after fact.

I found an interview with the author (who is also one of my favorite columnists) on the internet, so here are a few excerpts I've chosen:

On why she wrote the book: "My book is about the moral failure of liberalism in this country to confront one of the two great evils of the 20th century. I say that fighting Nazism came very naturally to liberals. They despised what the Nazis stood for. They recognized the threat. They were prepared to go to war to be sure that nobody, and particularly not us, had to live under that kind of a regime. Their great moral failure in the 20th century was failing to recognize that the communist threat was equally evil and equally dangerous. And so my book is about showing how academics, religious figures, journalists, all of the major opinion makers in this country -- not all, but the liberal ones got it so badly wrong about the cold war, about what we were fighting for and about this country."

Regarding the term "useful idiots", she explains that "they're the words of Vladimir Lenin, who, in his very cynical way, predicted that Western liberals and American liberals would swallow whole a lot of the lies presented by the Soviet Union and the communist movement and would prove themselves to be, in their credulity and in their naivete and in their sympathy for the communist cause, what he called useful idiots for their purposes."